The “miscast” 1990 movie Bruce Willis knew was doomed to fail: “It was stillborn, dead”
There are some movies that everyone knows are going to flop, and there’s nothing they can do about it. On the plus side, everybody gets paid, and as a freshly minted A-lister, Bruce Willis was paid well.
Having pocketed $5 million for his big-screen breakthrough as Die Hard‘s John McClane, once the classic actioner took flight at the box office, that became his going rate, which would have definitely softened the blow of starring in a film that the cast and crew were fully aware was on a hiding to nothing.
It shouldn’t have been, though: on paper, it had almost everything. The picture was based on bestselling source material, boasted one of the most dynamic directors of their day behind the camera, and carried more star power than your average cinematic satire, all of which meant nothing at the end of the day.
With the benefit of hindsight, Brian De Palma wishes he’d never cast Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities, and the actor would absolutely agree with him, having retrospectively called the 1990 misfire “one of the crappiest movies ever made,” and he wasn’t trying to be hyperbolic.
Morgan Freeman was in it, and he thought it was shite, too, a sentiment that was shared by critics and audiences alike, with the movie taking a battering from all corners and dying a slow, painful, and miserable death at the box office. It didn’t have many defenders, with Willis also piling on in the aftermath.
“It was stillborn, dead before it even got out of the box,” he reflected, suggesting that the critics had their knives sharpened before they’d even had a chance to see it. While that may or may not have been true, it would have helped The Bonfire of the Vanities‘ case exponentially if it wasn’t a steaming pile of crap.
“I was miscast,” Willis added. “I know that Tom Hanks thinks he was, too.” He’s being both honest and accurate, but what really got under his skin was De Palma allowing writer Julie Salamon on the set, who subsequently published The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco, a book that tore the production apart from start to finish.
“By the time we learned what she was doing, the damage was done,” he maintained. “Basically, she decided to take a big shit on a bunch of people she would never get to be in her own life,” with the star adding, for emphasis, that “she had the worst fucking breath of any organism I have ever encountered on the planet.”
It goes without saying that he wasn’t thrilled by Salamon’s presence, but even if she wasn’t there, he wouldn’t have bothered trying to defend The Bonfire of the Vanities, because he knew that some things are simply indefensible.
